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12 Chapter 3. Sparky Anderson Cindy Thomson George Lee “Sparky” Anderson was one of the great baseball men of all time in terms of success, integrity, and personality. He led the Cincinnati Reds to back-to-back world championships in 1975 and 1976 and the Detroit Tigers to a World Series title in 1984, becoming the first manager to win the World Series in both leagues. Four times in his career teams he managed won more than one hundred games, and in six other seasons his teams won at least ninety. In his twenty-six years managing in the Majors Anderson amassed 2,194 victories, five pennants, and three World Series championships. Born in Bridgewater, South Dakota, on February 22, 1934, to LeRoy and Shirley Anderson, George relocated with his family in 1942 to Southern California , where his father and grandparents found wartime work in the shipyards. LeRoy played some semipro baseball and passed his love of the game on to his son. Young George became a batboy for the University of Southern California’s Trojans baseball team, coached by Raoul “Rod” Dedeaux, who was an early influence in his baseball life. During his childhood Anderson played a lot of sandlot ball. In 1951 his American Legion team won a national championship at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium (later renamed Tiger Stadium), where Anderson later managed the Tigers. His Dorsey High School team won forty-two consecutive games, and Anderson was named an all-city player in his junior and senior years. In choosing Dorsey for its baseball program, Anderson passed up a school closer to home and had to take two buses. While still in high school, Anderson worked a summer job loading lumber onto boxcars. In the evenings he played with a semipro team. He graduated from Dorsey High in 1953 and Dedeaux offered him a partial baseball scholarship to usc. Anderson never went to college, though, because a Brooklyn Dodgers scout he had met years earlier on the sandlots, Lefty Phillips, offered him $250 a month to play for the Dodgers’ Santa Barbara team in the Class C California League. Anderson’s parents knew and trusted Phillips, and Anderson called him “the sharpest baseball man I ever met.”1 Phillips knew Anderson’s limitations and told him that to make it in baseball he would have to “Sparky Who?,” said the critics when he was hired in 1969. Anderson would go on to be one of history’s greatest managers. sparky anderson 13 work very hard. Anderson was only 5 feet 9 and weighed just 170 pounds, but his determination and will to win gave him an edge. Anderson’s boyhood friend Billy Consolo signed his first Major League contract that same year, with the Boston Red Sox. Consolo was one of baseball’s bonus babies, with the rule at the time requiring the team providing the bonus to keep the player on its Major League roster for two seasons. Anderson’s signing gave him a steady income, even if he wasn’t a bonus baby, and he bought an engagement ring for his childhood sweetheart, Carol Valle. The two had known each other since the fifth grade and began dating in high school. They married in October 1953, at the end of Anderson’s first Minor League season as a shortstop for the Santa Barbara Dodgers. He played in 141 games and hit for a .263 average. The playing manager at Santa Barbara was George Scherger, a man Anderson would later invite to coach for him in Cincinnati. Anderson described Scherger as a man who wanted to win badly. Whenever the team lost, there would be extra practice the next day. This drive influenced Anderson, who adopted it when he became a manager himself. Anderson moved around in the Brooklyn Minor League system, playing in Pueblo, Colorado; Fort Worth; Montreal in the International League; and Los Angeles in the Pacific Coast League. In Pueblo he hit .296 in 1954. In 1955 he moved up to DoubleA with the Texas League’s Fort Worth Cats. Tommy Holmes was the manager. (The team produced several future big league managers: Anderson; Dick Williams, who was Anderson’s opposing manager in the 1972 and 1984 World Series, managed in the Majors for twenty-one seasons, and joined Anderson in the Hall of Fame in 2008; Danny Ozark, who managed the Philadelphia Phillies and San Francisco Giants; Norm Sherry, who managed the California Angels and coached on several Major...

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